23 Things – Thing 5 & Thing 6

Thing 5 – Diversity

For me diversity is important because humans are diverse, and we need to live in a world that accepts and promotes that. It’s why every time I see a non-traditional couple in a mainstream environment, I get excited as I can see us progressing towards that reality – There was a recent advert for a bank that showed various life events that might need money, including one man proposing to his partner, and just seeing that sort of thing without any fanfares or trumpets, just as a normal and accepted state of affairs made me really happy.

I was actually quite pleased when the new emoji’s came in (more reflecting the Facebook article than the Apple article), because I felt like it was a step towards diversity and proper representation. However, I will say that I am white, and thus quite a lot of the nuances that surround race and racism probably escape me because of my privilege. Thus, I concentrate on areas that I do feel able to talk about with some authority, which for me is relationships and sexuality. The new emoji’s did include picture of non traditional couples (one man & one women, two men, and two women) which made me personally happy to see.

The other task we were asked to do was to create a Bitmoji. Here’s mine in a few different stickers.

Thing 6 – Accessibility

Accessibility on the web and computers is an issue that I am aware of because we have to consider it in the library for some of our users. A common example is a student with dyslexia, who will want to change text size, change background colours, and play with contrast so that they can better read the text on screen. Most of the library staff are aware of how to perform these tasks to help users if they do not know how to adjust the settings themselves. We also have machines that have text to speech and voice recognition software installed on them as alternative modes of interacting with the computer aside from keyboard and mouse.

I decided to examine this website for accessibility issues and put the address into the WAVE tool. I was surprised to find that I did have error, 11 of them, although they were all for the same issue – I haven’t given any alternative text for my images, which means if someone was using a text helper to navigate a web page then it wouldn’t be able to pick up on the images. It’s an issue that can be fixed and I will probably do so after finishing this post. I think does help to consider these issues, since it provides a good reminder of how some of our users of the library might need the extra help to properly access the services we provide, although nothing I have encountered whilst reading about accessibility has surprised me.